Tag: Clough-Hanson

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“The Weight of Hope” at Clough-Hanson.

After three venue changes, the 400-plus capacity Bryan Campus Life Center auditorium at Rhodes College was filled to standing room only, with dozens turned away at the door and at the school gates. Such is the draw of artist Dread Scott, whose work provides a clear connection from the bigotry and injustice of years past to the racism and state-sanctioned violence of the present day.

The September 8th talk was held in conjunction with “The Weight of Hope” group exhibit currently at Clough-Hanson Gallery through October 24th.

Scott’s visit could not have been more timely. He’s been courting controversy for 30 years with performance works (including asking people to walk on the U.S. flag) that speak directly to the current discussions in the media about nationalistic symbols and patriotism.

Most searing to Memphians, perhaps, is Scott’s I Am Not a Man performance stills, which play off the “I Am a Man” signs carried during the 1968 sanitation workers strike. Scott is shown walking the streets of New York wearing clothing befitting a man of the 1960s while holding a sign that reads, “I Am Not a Man.” The On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide stills feature Scott walking against the force of a fire hose, bringing to mind hoses used on civil rights protestors. How much (or how little) has changed in 50 years for black Americans, these images ask.

Scott’s most provocative work in the show is the updating of a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” flag from the 1930s with the insertion of the words “by Police” — an explicit link to today’s climate of protests against police brutality.

Also in the show: Mariam Ghani’s 28-minute dramatic narrative video The City & The City is about how the two halves of St. Louis live, but the descriptions of two societies (unequally) co-existing and overlapping in the same space at the same time could be about our own city.

Local painter Terry Lynn contributed three pieces to the exhibit. In a nod to the recent Olympics (and black American female dominance displayed therein), Rise features a young black gymnast beaming proudly with one arm outstretched, wearing an American flag leotard and surrounded by thick splotches in different colors. His most evocative work, Pink, is composed of a very young-looking black girl looking straight ahead clad in all pink clothing with her hands clasped in front of her. Most of the painting is not of her, but the black, oily-looking, roughly textured mass surrounding and enveloping the small, doe-eyed girl. She still has her naiveté, but the sinister world awaits her.

In the center of the room is Damon Davis’ All Hands on Deck — photographic prints of enlarged black male hands outstretched over a white background on heavy paper. On the back of the print is an explanation of the climate leading up to the work, beginning with the hope generated from the election of the country’s first black president through the death of Travyon Martin and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Davis began the project in Ferguson in 2014. From the text: “This exhibition looks at the impact of that shifting hope’s weight in the last eight years on the body politic, and in particular on the Black body.” Visitors are encouraged to “display the image where they live or work as a ‘sign of collective responsibility and an ode to that diverse collective dedicated to protecting human rights, no matter race, age, or gender.'” Viewers are invited to download their own images of hands, of all races and ages, at allhandsondeckproject.org.

The work in “The Weight of Hope” sticks to you. It is a call to action against injustice instead of idly standing by.

Through October 24th

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Art Art Feature

“I Thought I Might Find You Here” at Clough Hanson

CREDIT: Chip Pankey

Brian Pera’s sculptures about the suicide of his friend, Papatya Curtis, are not sentimental. They are colorful and brave and wildly sad, but they use none of the available sentiment — words and shapes and colors all comfortably ordered around grief — to explain loss.  

The pieces that make up Pera’s “I Thought I Might Find You Here,“ at Rhodes Clough-Hanson Gallery, are yarn, fabric, and wood assemblages in matte orange-red, black-currant purple, patagonia yellow, or not-my-first-rodeo teal. They look vital.

Pera first met Curtis in his neighborhood, at her yarn store, where he attended a weekly knit night. After her death in 2012, the yarn from the store was given away, and much of it now forms the raw materials of Pera’s sculptures.

The five sculptures that comprise the visual center of the show are organized around a film and a slideshow. The film, screened in a small side-gallery but ambiently available throughout the main gallery, shows visuals of knitting alongside audio interviews of Curtis’ friends, members of her knitting circle. The women talk about their late friend’s warmth, her bad luck in love, the day of her death, and how they each, individually and as a group, encountered what happened. In the slideshow, typed sentences broadcast in sheets of color against a back wall, Pera tells his version of the story. He describes Curtis and he describes his grief, but he disclaims both descriptions, saying it isn’t enough. “I won’t hold your attention,” he writes.

But he does hold our attention. The sculptures, the core of the show, have a progression. It is not clear if the emotional progression of the work matches the chronological order in which Pera built the pieces, but there is a definite spiritual chronology to the pieces — an invisible mountain, and Pera there climbing it. These are not memorials in the usual sense; they are the shapes grief makes in the body of someone grieving.

The first sculpture, your entry point, is freestanding but tethered to the low ceiling with a couple of bright chains. The body of the work is squarish, made of raw wood, some of the wood flecked with blue paint, some covered in orange muslin. There are spare knobs attached to odd sides of the work; a red belt; a line of hanging embroidery circles; a small wheel … elements strapped together in slightly organized chaos; details sans the thing they are detailing. In the belly of the sculpture there is a child-sized bundle of chicken wire wrapped in plastic and bright cloth, left exposed.

Behind the first sculpture, backed up against a wall, two posts from a deconstructed bed frame stand at an angle. Between the posts is a waterfall-like sheet of yellow thread. Bound in the thread are about 50 doll-sized, porcelain arms. The arms were made by Pera’s friend and collaborator, Nikkila Carrol, whose creations are anti-anatomical, shoulderless and strange, each frozen in a different gesture of failed defense. Next, there is a simple wooden chest attached to a hitch and mounted on wheels. The chest is draped with a colorful shawl, and the shawl is in turn draped with orange plastic construction fencing. This piece is compact but it has an implied motion. It asks to be taken somewhere. That call is answered by the fourth sculpture, a tower-like structure made of scrap wood and adorned with teal chimes and a heavy pink yarn hanging. If the chest asks to be dragged up a mountain, this tower is located at the summit of that climb. All the elements of the piece seem meant to blow in the wind.  

Finally, there is a compact, animal-like form made with blue and purple shag layered over a tight wrap of teal fabric. This last piece feels more born than made. If the rest of the sculptures can be read as a kind of frantic organization undertaken during the journey of grieving, this final work feels like what is allowed to stay on in the world after that process — something entirely new, created under circumstances of dangerous necessity.

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Art Art Feature

Work by Faith Wilding at Clough-Hanson

Faith Wilding wants us to remember that we have bodies and that those bodies can feel joy and pain and terror. And so she makes drawings. “We search for signs of the body,” she wrote in a recent essay. “We need constant affirmation …”  

Wilding’s most recent drawings, a watercolor series of deeply hued leaves and ovary-shaped tears, are lightly sketched and loosely colored. They are unframed and feel informal, like vivid excerpts from a four-decade-long diary. Their small scale is personal and, as a result, the works are powerful in the way that things made privately often are. As a part of Wilding’s current retrospective “Fearful Symmetries” at Rhodes’ Clough-Hanson Gallery, these works on paper offer a radical solution to the problems of the world: Make things with your hands. Share them with other people.

Red Tongue

Wilding is a founder of the feminist art movement, a multimedia and performance artist. Her long career includes activist work with cyber-feminists, a series of graphic and elegant “cyborg bodies” paintings (she calls them her “recombinants”), and a sustained focus on the female anatomy as a potential image for both beauty and terror. Her early work is currently experiencing renewed interest in museums and galleries — a 1972 crocheted installation work, “womb room” (originally built in a dilapidated Hollywood mansion as a part of the well-known Womanhouse installation) is soon to be reinstalled in the ICA Boston. “Fearful Symmetries,” which debuted at the Threewalls art space in Chicago, is a retrospective of her lesser-seen work, with a few better-known early pieces to provide context.

In one of the earlier pieces on display, Wilding’s 1978 Imago Femina, the artist invents a gilded herbological guide — an illuminated manuscript — around one or several fantastical plants. In these drawings, half-grown stalks and shoots wind upward, negotiated through dark purples, crimson reds, and gold leaf. The images are framed with black rectangles and seem as if they could have been pulled from old text.  

With Imago Femina, Wilding wants to make sacred — to make canon — the shapes of women’s bodies. To do this, she (in the company of many feminist artists) invokes flowers, not only for their signature similarity to women’s vulvas, but because their center-tending forms — their “fearful symmetries” — make them feel like corporeal descriptions of incorporeal things. The Imago Femina drawings are excerpted pages from a book of symbols that was never written, or has been erased.

Wilding’s 1974 Moth Triptych: Emergence of the Moth, Debut of the Moth, and Dissolution of the Moth: for Virginia (a reference to Virginia Woolf’s essay “Death of a Moth”) goes along similar lines, but the penciled forms are not as easily identified as plants. The drawings’ half-ovals and long lines recall warped light along the horizon at dawn, distance bent by perspective.

Virginia Woolf is one of Wilding’s idols, perhaps because Woolf’s characters so often understand their lives as bound to soil and water: “My roots are threaded,” says Louis in Woolf’s Waves, “like fibers in a flower-pot, round and round about the world.” Across the gallery from Imago Femina, Wilding’s drawing, Wait-with Virginia depicts Wilding with Woolf crouched behind the artist’s shoulder, whispering in her ear.

Wait-with Virginia is a companion piece to Wilding’s most famous performance work, a 1974 poem called Waiting, and to her 2007 revision of that work, Wait-With (both on view as a part of the exhibition). Wilding’s original performance of Waiting is a well-known recorded example of the early feminist performance. In the film, Wilding wears a long skirt and rocks slightly back and forth in her chair, her eyes bolted to an indeterminate point in the distance. Her audience sits on the floor, surrounding her, sharing silently in her indignation as Wilding pronounces the passive phases of a woman’s life: “Waiting for him to make the first move … Waiting for my baby to come … Waiting for my friends to die.” The poem and its recording are effective, in part, because Wilding seems not to just recite her poem, but to divine it in sympathy with her community of listeners.

In Wait-With, Wilding reimagines the act of waiting as a space of meditative, unfilled, non-capitalized time/space. “Waiting,” says Wilding, ” … open space between action.” Forty years after the original performance, Wait-With comprehends something Waiting did not anticipate — that American women’s ascension in the workplace has not inspired the sort of structural change early feminists envisioned. Waiting in Wait-With is held up as the opposite of constant capital production, as a sacred time in which we make art and create community, not one to be taken for granted.